As much as Donald Trump loves baseless conspiracy theories, the president seems to have a special affinity for conspiracy theories involving his immediate predecessor in the White House.

On Tuesday, for example, Trump declared via Twitter, “Just out that the Obama Administration granted citizenship, during the terrible Iran Deal negotiation, to 2,500 Iranians - including to government officials. How big (and bad) is that?”

This claim from Trump appears to have originated with a hard-line Iranian cleric who opposes the Iran deal. [Iranian cleric Mojtaba Zonnour] gave an interview to an Iranian newspaper, which was then repackaged by Iran’s semiofficial news agency, which was then picked up by U.S. media and then by the president on his Twitter feed (with some of the details garbled).

Three senior Obama administration officials pushed back on Trump’s claim, including [Ben] Rhodes, who was intimately involved in the JCPOA negotiations.

The White House has produced literally no evidence to substantiate the president’s claim, and as the New York Times added, actual evidence points in the opposite direction: “American government data show no spike in naturalizations of Iranians or huge increase in green cards given to Iranians in 2015 when compared to the two previous years.”

All of which brings us to a place we’ve been many times: watching Trump peddle obvious falsehoods in the hopes of undermining Barack Obama.

But in this case, it’s also worth questioning how the Republican president came to believe this specific bogus claim.

Despite the fact that the United States generally has no use for propaganda from Iranian hardliners, Iranian cleric Mojtaba Zonnour’s literally unbelievable rhetoric was picked up by Fox News.

The report from the network noted that there’s no evidence to support the claims. but Donald Trump – who oversees and has access to a vast intelligence network – nevertheless decided to tell the American public that the Iranian hardliners are correct, going even further than Fox News was willing to go.

It would’ve bee

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

About a month ago, Donald Trump used Twitter to issue a curious charge: “Our Justice Department must not let Awan & Debbie Wasserman Schultz off the hook. The Democrat I.T. scandal is a key to much of the corruption we see today. They want to make a ‘plea deal’ to hide what is on their Server. Where is Server? Really bad!”

At face value, this looked an awful lot like a sitting president abusing his office and directing federal law enforcement to go after his political rivals. But just below the surface, there was another problem: very few people had any idea who or what Trump was talking about.

Who’s Awan? There’s a “Democrat I.T. scandal”? Since when?

This week, the story came into focus – and Trump’s odd claims unraveled.

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday publicly debunked conspiracy theories pushed by President Donald Trump and right-wing media that a former Democratic aide charged with bank fraud was actually a foreign spy trying to steal government secrets.

In a plea deal with Imran Awan, who worked as an information technology aide for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., and other Democratic lawmakers, prosecutors said they had conducted “a thorough investigation” into claims that Awan stole information from government servers on behalf of another country while working for House Democrats, but reported that they found no evidence to support the conspiracy theories.

Trump’s conspiracy theories are often difficult to take seriously, but this one was especially silly.

In reality, Imran Awan did do something wrong: he submitted false information while seeking a home-equity loan. He did so because he wanted to quickly transfer money to his ailing father in Pakistan.

Conservative media and Donald Trump decided that Imran Awan wasn’t just some I.T. guy who improperly sought a home-equity loan; he was actually the “key” to uncovering widespread “corruption,” including developments related to the Russia scandal.

And as a result of this bizarre conspiracy theory, some random guy who committed some random crime became a target of the president of the United States.

Justice Department officials took the time to carefully examine each of the conspiracy theories surrounding Awan, and they determined that there’s no evidence to substantiate any of them. The president’s claims were simply ridiculous.

I’ll look forward to Trump’s apology. That’s on the way, right?

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

Just over a year after President Donald Trump signed his “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, his Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida has filed for permission to hire 61 foreign workers.

Trump’s Palm Beach business filed requests with the U.S. Labor Department for additional visas for foreign servers and cooks, according to records submitted Thursday and Friday. The employees would work October through the following May. Servers would earn $12.68 an hour and cooks $13.31 an hour.

Since late 2015, Mar-a-Lago has filed 10 separate requests for multiple temporary work visas for foreign employees.

The New York Times has reported that since 2010, only 17 of 300 American applicants were hired to work at the resort that Trump now calls the “Winter White House” or the “Southern White House.” Since 2010, Mar-a-Lago has obtained a total of 500 H-2B visas for seasonal foreign workers, according to The New Yorker.

The Trump Organization hired at least 1,260 foreign workers from 2001 to 2016, according to a CNN analysis. Trump appears to prefer foreign workers at his resorts who are female, young, attractive and with Romanian or South African accents that convey an “exotic appeal,” former workers told the network.

In order to obtain the H-2B visas required for non-agricultural workers, employers must prove that there are not enough Americans willing to do the work — which Trump has insisted is the case.

But in a similar situation last year, Mar-a-Lago apparently didn’t make much of an effort to find American workers. The Washington Post reported that the resort only placed two hard-to-find classified ads in tiny type for waiters, and provided no phone number or email information. Workers could apply only by fax or mail. The ads were posted a week after Mar-a-Lago asked the Labor Department for permission to hire 70 foreign workers, which was granted last November.

Nonprofit placement agency CareerSource Palm Beach County told The Palm Beach Post that many Americans were eager to work at Mar-a-Lago, and that the agency had a database last November of 5,136 qualified candidates for “various hospitality positions.”

Despite Trump railing about U.S. immigration policy ― for both the undocumented and documented ― his administration made an extra 15,000 H-2B visas available for businesses in May.

Mar-a-Lago was applying for foreign worker visas about the same time the president launched “Made in America Week” at the White House a year ago.

Trump said then: “We believe jobs must be offered to American workers first. Does that make sense?”

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

hpo
Former White House Stenographer Speaks Out: ‘Trump Was Lying To The American People’
Beck Dorey-Stein told CNN that Trump doesn’t like using stenographers because he doesn’t care about the truth.

Quote:

A former White House stenographer said Wednesday that she resigned because President Donald Trump was “lying to the American people.”

The stenographer, Beck Dorey-Stein, joined the White House in 2012 during Barack Obama’s presidency. But she “couldn’t be proud” of working in the White House under Trump, she told CNN on Wednesday, and resigned in early 2017.

“I was so proud to serve under the Obama administration,” Dorey-Stein said. “And I felt like President Trump was lying to the American people and not even trying ... to tell the truth.”

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

gee right wingers are now of the party that if the president can lie over major things like he claimed he never knew the Penthouse or committed adultry with her a few months after getting married. and trump just lies and lies.

so the right wing party takes the same path.. again heads of committees to protect the party over america.

Donald Trump traveled to Pennsylvania early yesterday to honor the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but before heading to Air Force One, the president thought it was necessary to whine on Twitter for a while and peddle a new conspiracy theory.

One of his missives read, “New Strzok-Page texts reveal ‘Media Leak Strategy.’ @FoxNews So terrible, and NOTHING is being done at DOJ or FBI - but the world is watching, and they get it completely.”

As it turns out, someone “gets it completely,” but it’s not Donald Trump.

The president appeared to be echoing a new line of attack pushed by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), one of the White House’s top allies in Congress, who’s worked up about a text former FBI agent Peter Strzok sent Justice Department lawyer Lisa Page on April 10, 2017. According to Meadows, Strzok wrote, “I had literally just gone to find this phone to tell you I want to talk to you about media leak strategy with DOJ before you go.”

This, according to Trump, is “terrible” and worthy of federal law enforcement scrutiny. There’s reason to believe the president doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Strzok’s lawyer, Aitan Goelman, responded Tuesday that client was not referring to leaking to the media – but a strategy to prevent leaks.

“The term ‘media leak strategy’ in Mr. Strzok’s text refers to a Department-wide initiative to detect and stop leaks to the media. The president and his enablers are once again peddling unfounded conspiracy theories to mislead the American people,” Goelman said.

The pushback to the conspiracy theory didn’t just come from Strzok’s lawyer; members of Congress were eager to highlight reality, too. Roll Call added:

Democrats attempted to refute point-by-point a letter from GOP Rep. Mark Meadows to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in which Meadows claims text messages between a former FBI agent and a Justice Department lawyer recently released to Congress show there is a “systemic culture of media leaking by high-ranking officials” at the agencies.

But the fired FBI official Peter Strzok and DOJ lawyer Lisa Page were not texting about leaking information to the press – they were texting about combatting leaks, Democrats said Tuesday.

Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform and Judiciary Committees, respectively, said Meadows ripped two isolated text messages out of context to paint an inaccurate picture of the text conversation between Strzok and Page.

I’m not yet in a position to know whether Mark Meadows deliberately peddled a deceptive claim. It’s possible the far-right North Carolina congressman was simply confused and didn’t take the time to review the information in its full context.
Either way, Trump didn’t bother to check. Instead, the Conspiracy Theorist in Chief got the story backwards condemning a “Media Leak Strategy” that set out to combat leaks, not disseminate them.
Last summer, the president declared, “When I make a statement, I like to be correct. I want the facts… Before I make a statement, I need the facts.” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later added that Trump “believes in making sure that information is accurate before pushing it out as fact.”

How’s that working out?

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

CHART: Donald Trump Set a New Record for Most False Statements in August

Quote:

As of the afternoon of September 12, 2018, according to Star records, Trump hit 2,519 false claims for the first 591 days of his presidency for an average of 4.3 per day.

To explain their reasoning for tracking such a thing, the top of the page states:

“The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why?”

“Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected. And we think the sheer frequency of Trump’s inaccuracy is a central story of his presidency.”

And according to Dale, Donald Trump set a new record for false statements in August, namely 321 in August, up from 280 in July which was up from 268 in June, all of which set records at the time.

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

CHART: Donald Trump Set a New Record for Most False Statements in August

Quote:

As of the afternoon of September 12, 2018, according to Star records, Trump hit 2,519 false claims for the first 591 days of his presidency for an average of 4.3 per day.

To explain their reasoning for tracking such a thing, the top of the page states:

“The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why?”

“Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected. And we think the sheer frequency of Trump’s inaccuracy is a central story of his presidency.”

And according to Dale, Donald Trump set a new record for false statements in August, namely 321 in August, up from 280 in July which was up from 268 in June, all of which set records at the time.

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